Matthew MurraySeagate Barracuda XT (3TB)With Seagate's new Barracuda XT hard drive, you won't need to install additional hardware to access all 3TB of its storage space, but you will need special software&mdash;and the willingness to pay more.

Lots of storage space. Does not require Host Bus Adapter to access full capacity. Speedy.

Cons

Expensive. DiscWizard software slightly clunky.

Bottom Line

With Seagate's new Barracuda XT hard drive, you won't need to install additional hardware to access all 3TB of its storage space, but you will need special software—and the willingness to pay more.

Solid-state drives (SSDs) may slowly be expanding their market share relative to hard drives, but traditional spinning media still wins as far as price and capacity go. The only problemand one that's just now becoming an issueis what happens above 2.19TB, where traditional partitioning won't always give you access to all the space a drive has to offer. Many companies are devising solutions, but they don't get much simpler than Seagate's with its new 3TB Barracuda XT: Just download and run some software. It really is that straightforward, too, but you'll have to pay a lot ($279.99 list) for that ease of use. If you want a fast, simple drive, you have one here, but not everyone will find the convenience worth the cost.

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Design and Features
In most ways, this Barracuda XT is a typical 3.5-inch hard drive: It spins at 7,200 rpm (still the desktop standard) has 64MB of cache, and supports the new 6-Gbps SATA III technology for top-speed data transfers. But to take advantage of its full extra-large capacity, you need to deal with the logical block addressing issue that occurs with hard drives over 2.19TB. (For more detailed information about this, see our story, "The Problem with Big Hard Drives.") With the first 3TB drive on the market, the Western Digital Caviar Green ($239 list, 3.5 stars), Western Digital included a Host Bus Adapter (HBA) card that ensured every PC knew how to talk to the drive. Because Asus manufactures other PC components, it hammered out a software program called Disk Unlocker that opened up the space between 2.19TB and 3TBbut only on Asus motherboards.

Seagate's solution is similar. Download and install the DiscWizard software from Seagate's Website, and you can create the equivalent of a virtual drive that can use all 3TB of the Barracuda XT. The software is 144MB, so downloading it may take a while. And though the process for setting up the drive is simpleinvolving initializing (with GUID Partition Tables, which can recognize the higher capacities) and partitioning the drive much as with the Windows Disk Management utilitythe controls for doing so are a bit unclear and less flexible than Microsoft's (Seagate wanted to ensure you wouldn't make any mistakes). Even so, we were up and using all of the drive in about ten minutes totalmore or less the amount of time it would take us to install the 3TB Caviar Green and its HBA.

Because the Barracuda XT spins much faster than the Caviar Green, there wasn't much of a comparison in terms of performance: Seagate beat out Western Digital almost across the board. A sampling of scores: 148.4 MBps for the Barracude XT versus 130.3 MBps for the Caviar Green in the Linear Read (Begin) test, 127.5 MBps versus 95.9 MBps in the Random Read Test, and 239.6 MBps versus 231.8 MBps in the Buffered Read test, all in AIDA64's disk benchmark test; 151.7 MBps versus 130.5 in the Sequential Read task, and 150.8 MBps versus 127.8 MBps in Sequential Write, both in CrystalDiskMark; and 154 MBps (at 8,192KB) versus 133.6 MBps (at 2,048KB) Write and 154.6 MBps (at both 64KB and 128KB) versus 136.4 MBps (at 256KB) Read in the ATTO Disk Benchmark. The PCMark Vantage HDD test, which examines a range of different average hard-drive utilization scenarios, continued the pattern by awarding the Barracuda XT a score of 5,435 and the Caviar Green a score of 4,219.

The difference in performance is significant enough that if you wanted to use the Barracuda XT as a boot drive, you couldthat's something for which the Caviar Green would not be ideal. That 7,200-rpm rotational speed grants the Barracuda XT more flexibility, which is always nice to have.

Cost, though, is a significant factor with this Seagate Barracuda XT. Because you'll have to shell out $80 more for it than for Western Digital's model, you'll need to make sure that the speed, configuration utility, and interior space you'll save are really worth it to you. You can buy three or four 7,200-rpm 1TB drives (including Seagate's own Barracuda model) and still pay less than you will for this one 3TB Barracuda XT. If you know you want a single, super-roomy storage drive to complement a 10,000-rpm drive or SSD for Windows and applications and therefore it doesn't need to be fast, and if you don't care about installing a little extra hardware, then the Caviar Green is certainly more economical. For fulfilling a more active role in your desktop, however, the Barracuda XT has the added benefits of zippiness and convenienceprovided you feel like paying for them.

Seagate Barracuda XT (3TB)

Bottom Line: With Seagate's new Barracuda XT hard drive, you won't need to install additional hardware to access all 3TB of its storage space, but you will need special software&mdash;and the willingness to pay more.

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About the Author

Matthew Murray got his humble start leading a technology-sensitive life in elementary school, where he struggled to satisfy his ravenous hunger for computers, computer games, and writing book reports in Integer BASIC. He earned his B.A. in Dramatic Writing at Western Washington University, where he also minored in Web design and German. He has been... See Full Bio

Seagate Barracuda XT (3TB)

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